Insights from our experts

Struggling to Manage SAP BI4 Version Management

SAP BI4 version management is one of those things that some of us have been dreaming about for a very long time. I remember many moons ago spending several hours a week cutting .biar files and checking them into a version management system for development teams. Clunky but effective. BI4 Version management has the promise (still) to relieve that pain, but still carries a lot of pain itself.

I recently had a struggle with Version Management that was a bugger to diagnose, but easy to fix. I had everything set up properly in the Application settings (or so I thought) and was going to test out the versioning. When I tested the VMS settings in Applications, it said everything was fine (liar). But when I went over into the VC application and tried to check an object in, it said it added it, but it didn’t give it a version number and all of the other options were still grayed out.

Version Management Application Panel

If I tried to add the object again, it said it already existed in VC. I was stumped. It took me a long time to find the issue because there was no specific error message being thrown. Turns out the problem really easy to fix. The issue was the “Workspace Directory” folder I had specified in the VMS settings. The service account that was running the Server Intelligence Agent didn’t have permissions to write to the Check Out folder that I had specified. I changed the value in the Workspace Directory field in the VMS settings in the Applications section of the CMC to a folder where the service account had rights. Here is where you change the setting:

VMS Settings in the Application section of the CMC

After I made the change, saved the settings, and bounced the Adaptive Processing Server that is running the LCM services, everything worked like a charm. Simple fix for a somewhat vexing problem.